Madame Mathilde and the Pickle of Domesticity
by KnightNight7203
Summary: "Two days after the strike Katherine Plumber is allowed to go back to work. Contrary to what one might assume based on her long and lamentable history with idleness, however, this fact leaves her fuming." In which Katherine is relegated to an advice column, the newsboys have some weird hidden talents, and things slowly return to normal.
1. Chapter 1

**I'm baaaaaack**

* * *

Two days after the strike Katherine Plumber is allowed to go back to work. Contrary to what one might assume based on her long and lamentable history with idleness, however, this fact leaves her fuming.

Don't worry—she hasn't lost her mind in the chaos and fervor of the strike, despite what _some people_ might assume. No, her fuming is extremely valid. She fumes for Good Reasons.

First, she fumes because she's found herself in a position where she needs permission to do something she's been doing her whole life. (Writing, that is, not working–although sometimes she does feel suspiciously like an aging retiree who's been dealing with this white-collar hierarchy bullshit for more than half a century.) Katherine Plumber has always been more of an ask-for-forgiveness kind of girl, although she's quickly learning that this particular trick only works a limited number of times. It now seems she's worn it out, at least with these particular people. She can't just slip a story into the pile and get back to business; no, she needs to grovel.

She _loathes_ groveling. God knows she's had to do it enough at home.

But the main reason for her ire is because she's been reinstated with _conditions_, and those conditions are as follows:

1\. Thou shalt not produce a single sentence of writing that reflects poorly on the Lord and Savior of the newspaper business, the Venerable and Most Threatening Joseph Pulitzer, or his chef-d'oeuvre, his magnum opus, the Magnificent, Impeccable _World_.

2\. Thou shalt remain at your desk, so as not to get any Treacherous Ideas about investigative reporting. As of this day, the fourth of August 1899, all professional capacities of Lady Reporters begin and end at the door.

3\. Thou shalt wait patiently to be given mere table scraps of stories by Wise, Generous Male Reporters. In the event that no such stories are forthcoming, thou shalt prepare drinks for these Esteemed Colleagues, and perhaps answer the phones.

She thinks there were more conditions, actually, but she stopped listening after that last one. Is this a job, or indentured servitude? Honestly, her father's receptionist gets more responsibilities. More freedom.

Katherine has always been a free spirit, a slide-down-the-banister, finger-paint-(badly)-in-the-foyer, forgo-petticoats-in-the-summer kind of girl. Of course, with how tightly she's laced into her expensive dress today, and the fact that her hair is pinned neatly out of her face (all the better for that pesky groveling, she'd decided when she forced herself to wake up an extra hour early to get ready), it's a little hard to see that in her now. She'd assumed the dirt under her nails and a carefully cultivated feral look in her eyes would give her away, preserve some of her wild dignity in this stifling, restrictive world.

She'd obviously assumed wrong. So, _so_ wrong.

She should've run here barefoot through Central Park in her nightgown, complete with streaks of mud on her face and leaves tangled into her hair. They could have called her the Tarzan of the Sun, sent her to report on land speculation in the west, maybe Caribbean piracy. Or, she could've dug out her old spectacles, teased her hair to achieve a mad scientist look—maybe then they would've given her stories about hot air balloons with wings, rocking bathtubs that mimic ocean waves.

But what do they give her instead? What remains for a female reporter once vaudeville and flower shows are taken off the table?

Fashion, perhaps, she'd thought. That, or the weather. In her head, on her calm, _civilized_ walk here, she'd mentally prepared for such a sentence. There were ways to make these subjects interesting: women in trousers, tornadoes and earthquakes, the like.

But in reality, her fate is worse: she's been condemned to resurrect _Madame Mathilde_ instead.

She remembers the column from her childhood, very well in fact. They'd had maid after maid who swore by it. She remembers listening them gossip about the hidden meanings of different colored ribbons and the scandalous nature of lace bloomers. She also remembers exaggeratedly gagging when one of them brought it up, muttering something about "useless old lady drivel" that made the nearest house boy cough up his glass of water into a potted plant.

Because that's what it was, really. A sixty-year-old, washed-up woman giving watered-down, sanitized advice to other sixty-year-old, washed-up women. Katherine had nothing against housekeeping, nothing against the elderly and homemakers and mothers, but the column was so obviously filtered through an oppressive male lens. There was never anything about menstruation, or women's suffrage, or self defense in its letters. She can't imagine people like Medda Larkin, or … or Alice Roosevelt reading it.

"It's the perfect job for you," Paul Dana, the paper's thin, balding editor, tells her from his safe perch behind his desk. "Civilized, respectable, _delicate_. It'll let you put that expensive upbringing to good use." He pauses, wets his lips. "And some day, if your husband finds out you worked at a newspaper, he probably won't even leave you because of it."

Katherine bites her cheek hard and sits on her hands and tries not to explode all over his expensive carpet. Throw up on his crisp starched shirt. What have you. Dana's weaselly, condescending grin, paired with those loathsome words, makes her hate him more than she's ever hated anyone in her life. She takes a deep breath to respond, probably with something moderately rude—something unmistakably _indelicate_—but he holds up a finger to cut her off.

And then, the final nail in his coffin (her coffin? Both of their coffins?): "Your father tells me he approves, Miss Pulitzer."

Katherine wants to scream. Actually, she wants to punch him. Then she wants to hunt down her father and lay into him as well, because nobody was supposed to know where she came from, _especially_ not here.

She's not a huge proponent of violence, especially after the shocking brutality of the strike. The pen is mightier than the sword, etc., etc. Still, nothing Katherine has written thus far has managed to be quite so profoundly satisfying as the solid slap she gave her ex-best friend Amelia Rose at the end of her twelfth birthday party. She remembers that feeling well.

Nonetheless, she restrains herself.

Perhaps she should be kinder to these irritable creatures, these blustering, pompous men. After all, they've largely functioned in well-behaved, spectacle-free spheres their whole lives—they've had no experience with bans and blacklisting and banishment, at least not until her. Family feud with a limited scope or not, Katherine's drama probably kept them all up at night as they imagined the paper being shut down, their names appearing at news desks across the city with a big red line through them, too. Maybe she's lucky they took her back at all.

Maybe. But she still hasn't convinced herself she wouldn't have been better off.

"You can start now," Dana says, gesturing flippantly to her jail cell—sorry, her desk.

"I'll start Monday," Katherine responds curtly, and she stomps out the door.

* * *

**Tarzan wasn't written until 1912 and Alice Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been famous yet, but I'm taking some artistic liberties.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Somewhere along line, over the years, I've written 88,000 words of Newsies content. Huh.**

* * *

Here's the thing, the most unfortunate part about this whole arrangement: all that talk of "expensive upbringings" is a lie.

Oh, she'd been to boarding school, sure—for a whopping two years, not even. And she'd paid attention for maybe twenty minutes out of those long sixteen months before she'd completely given up. After that, she studiously devoted herself to becoming what one might call a "problem child": chaotic, distracted, and virtually unteachable in any way, at least when it came to things young ladies were meant to be interested in learning.

In cooking classes, she swiped fingerfulls of frosting and quietly experimented with how long it took to light different consistencies of batter ablaze in the oven. When she was meant to be sewing or embroidering, she was knotting finger games to play with the other girls when their teachers' backs were turned. Instead of working on neat penmanship, she scrawled stories about her father in the war, practicing writing ledes and integrating made-up quotations until all her candles burned down to stubs. Instead of elaborately styling her hair, she snipped at the ends with a pair of dull scissors each morning, shortening it progressively until she was caught and scolded.

She rode horses astride with the stable boys after supper and refused to sit side-saddle during morning lessons. She dumped cosmetics down the toilet rather than using them on her face. On particularly hot days, she swam in the lake in only her chemise.

Then, the April she turned fifteen, they caught her engaging in certain unbecoming activities with the daughter of a railroad tycoon behind the greenhouse, and she'd been politely sent away and asked never to return.

Her father had shipped her off to the country that summer, to live with a distant aunt and clean pig pens as punishment. Somewhat predictably, perhaps, this actually ended up being the best summer she'd ever had. Instead of pricking her fingers with pins and being stuffed into increasingly tighter corsets as her figure continued to stretch and change, she swapped her slippers and petticoats for practical boots, gathered her hair in a messy knot on top of her head, and happily romped through the wilderness with an older girl from several miles down the road, the cook's soft-spoken son, and a giant drooling monster of a dog. She learned to identify poisonous berries, help sheep give birth, and chase bees out from the woodpile. But she certainly didn't learn much about being proper during her time there.

When she returned to the city, her family never spoke of the Boarding School Incident again. Some things did change—she wasn't left alone with her younger sister anymore, and her father started parading her before upstanding young suitors earlier than he perhaps might have otherwise. Still, in many ways it was far better to be home than hidden away at a dusty old school.

She worked on improving her writing. She taught herself to talk politics with her father's business associates, while simultaneously avoiding and/or offending all of the suitors. She quietly squirreled away her allowance, and money earned writing short fiction pieces and teaching servants to read, until she had enough saved to get a place of her own.

Now, she likes to think her truly wild days are long behind her. She travels fully dressed, and when she saw the railroad tycoon's daughter across the room at a party in Boston over the winter, she barely even blushed. But all that to say, she honestly doesn't know the first thing about _stain removal_ or _flirtation_ or whatever other nonsense is in these letters that start pouring in the second the _Sun_ announces they're reviving the column.

When she spills soup down the front of one of her dresses, she soaks it in water and pretends the lingering mark is a bloodstain from a battle with a vicious foe. As for flirting, well—nobody who knows her would ever ask her about something like that. _Honestly_.

Yes, sir—she's in far, far over her head. And with her mother dead, her living sisters estranged, her father livid (and therefore his servants out of reach), and some kind of an image to uphold before everyone else, she doesn't exactly have anyone to turn to for desperately-needed assistance, either.

Rats.

* * *

Jack Kelly, newsboy extraordinaire, strike leader, and possible bane of her existence, follows her home from work the day she turns in her first draft of the Mathilde column.

Well, he tries to follow her home. She notices him about seven minutes before she arrives and starts walking in circles, just large enough to stop him from realizing what she's doing, moving further and further away from her building with every step. She's not quite sure how she feels about him just yet. She's also not quite sure she wants him to know where she lives.

She does know one thing—she's definitely smarter than he is, despite what he'd maybe like to believe. He ambles along half a block behind her, hat lopsided and a stupid grin on his face, clearly convinced she has no idea he's there and confident he's about to romantically sneak through her bedroom window or something. She imagines he thinks it'll be charming. She imagines he's done it before, who knows how many times.

Those girls probably swooned. She'd be hard pressed not to whack him with her rolling pin—it's not like she uses it for anything else anyway.

Okay, so she's sure about another thing, too—she's in a terrible mood. Her column is inaccurate and badly written, and she's either going to be fired, called out in front of the whole newsroom, or complimented because they don't think she's capable of anything better. She's honestly not sure which would be worse.

Maybe she should warn Jack about her poorly suppressed rage.

She probably won't, though.

She finally stops on the steps of a fancy bank, mostly because the polished marble will make a nice backdrop for whatever this is about to be. She has no idea what it's about to be. They fought a bit. They kissed twice (okay, so she kissed him. She's still not sure where that came from). She volunteered to follow him anywhere, and he agreed to rewrite his entire life plan and give up his dream of Santa Fe for her.

After which she hid for an entire week while he did God knows what. And so here they are.

"So," he says, coming to a stop in front of her and leaning against a pillar, the picture of suavity. She tries to ignore the way her heart gives a little skip at his proximity—really, this only makes her testier in the end. "This is where Katherine Pulitzer rests her pretty little head at night."

"No," she says shortly. She wishes he wouldn't call her that. "It's actually not."

This unexpected fact throws a bit of a wrench in his confidence. His arm slides off the pillar, leaving him briefly pinwheeling for balance. "Huh?"

"I don't live here," she repeats. "It's a bank. You were following me."

He blinks a few times. "I was?"

Katherine just raises an eyebrow.

In the back of her mind, she's aware of some kind of regression here—instead of the girl who sneaks around her father's basement with this boy, plotting to change the world and singlehandedly save hundreds of kids, she's become the one who brushes him off in the street again. But at the same time, she's also the girl who is increasingly belittled and looked down on at work, relegated to the soft, feminine, _useless_ tasks, and she can't stand to think how much worse her entire situation would become if she were to run around daydreaming about some boy. She's sure the men at the office would be able to tell—that they'd feel the romantic inclinations pouring off of her in waves.

Katherine Plumber doesn't do things halfway, after all, and that includes emotions—whether she wants them or not.

None of this is Jack's fault, of course. Not if she's honest. But she can't help feeling, somehow, as if it's deeply related all the same.

"I just wanted to talk to you," he says, warily now, watching her carefully for any hint of how his words are being received. She keeps her face blank to make this difficult. "I didn't think you'd mind—hell, you've known where I live since practically the beginning."

_You weren't so happy about that either, at first,_ she wants to say. That, or, _the beginning of what, exactly?_

Instead, she huffs a deep breath and says, "Well, I do mind."

His mouth opens and closes, a little like the fish in the tank of her father's study. It's unclear whether he will even recover at this point. She thinks about taking pity on him and backing off. She thinks about apologizing, even.

"So what did you want?" she asks instead, tone clipped.

"Je-sus," he breathes, taking off his hat and running a hand through his hair. "You sure are grumpy today, Plumber."

Maybe it's how his voice wavers, almost imperceptibly, when he says her name—her chosen name, not the one that ties her to her father. Maybe it's the way that, when she looks a little closer, his face looks pale and his eyes look dark, like he hasn't been sleeping, or eating, for all she knows. Maybe it's even the little splash of paint on his collar, the yellow a sharp contrast to the dull gray sky, that she can't quite tear her eyes from once she notices it. But either way, all the fight leaves her in a whoosh, leaving something faintly apologetic behind. "Sorry," she says. "It was just a hard day at work."

"You wanna tell me about it?"

_No_, she starts to say. _No, I do not._ But friendships are based on trust and she probably does want to be friends with this boy, whatever else they may or may not be destined to become, and so she forces away her reservations and explains the situation. The _wonderful, perfect, unbelievable, miserable_ situation.

She's never really thought of Jack Kelly as a particularly patient person before—or not, as she hasn't actually considered it at all in the past—but it's something she's immensely aware and appreciative of all of a sudden. He doesn't interrupt her once.

"Well, damn," he says when she's finished ranting. "Madame Mathilde."

She snorts, too out of breath to cackle madly like she kind of wants to. "You know it?"

"Yeah, well, I'd be a real shitty businessman if I didn't." He shakes his head. "Old ladies eat that stuff up. She was the easiest way to sell papes to somebody over fifty."

Katherine is suddenly overcome by the image of an old woman handing a pile of coins to a tiny, wide-eyed Jack Kelly of the past, and for a moment, she feels _slightly_ more charitable toward the fictional Mathilde. But only slightly. "So the column's done one productive thing," she grumbles.

"You can't tell me you didn't find it useful." His voice is almost incredulous. Really—does he know her _at all_?

"You're right," she replies snidely, "I did. As _kindling_."

She snatches the most recent letter out of her bag and hands it to him: _Dear Madame Mathilde, I take great pride in my appearance, but there's one thing I can't control—the odor that comes from my shoes when I remove them. How do I make sure my feet smell as fresh as I look every day?_

"Look how hopeless this is!" she says. "I mean, just leave your shoes on!"

He scans it quickly and giggles. She resists the urge to smack him. "So you're really all worked up because you got no clue how to write about fancy indoors stuff? Are you kiddin' me?"

"I can't think of a single person who would know the answer to this," she says. Which isn't strictly true—the servants probably would, and her sisters, and maybe her aunt out on the farm, but she'll be getting no help from them in the near future. So he doesn't need to know that.

To her surprise, though, Jack smiles and shakes his head.

"Nah," he says. "This stuff is easy—it ain't that hard to find a good answer. In fact—me an' the boys can help right now. You should come back with me."

Then, letter crushed in his hand, he turns and skips back toward the lodging house, leaving her to pick her jaw up off the floor and trail behind him.


End file.
